As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery.

I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery.